Monday, April 8, 2013

Perfect Clarity...

Supposing Joe the Plumber actually got rich. Here’s what’s in store for him. As The Hill reports, “Obama budget to take aim at wealthy IRAs”

President Obama’s budget, to be released next week, will limit how much wealthy individuals – like Mitt Romney – can keep in IRAs and other retirement accounts. The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

Under the plan, a taxpayer’s tax-preferred retirement account, like an IRA, could not finance more than $205,000 per year of retirement – or right around $3 million this year....

The shorthand for this process is ‘Cyprus’....

And sure enough the trend is global. Australian Prime Minister “Julia Gillard has failed to rule out if Labor will raid superannuation funds in the May budget, saying any decisions made for the sector will be in Australia’s long term interest.” That means she’s going to do it.

Are you fabulously wealthy? Are you planning on becoming fabulously wealthy anytime soon?

Forget the anxiety about government coming for your guns. It’s your money they’re interested in. The gun part is just to make the money part easier. And if they can’t get the bucks one way, they’ll try another. “French President Francois Hollande declared on Thursday that companies would have to pay a 75 percent tax on salaries over a million euros after his plan for a “super-tax” on individuals was knocked down by the constitutional court.”

I've long believed that national governments provide one another with two things:

Sources of new ideas in oppression;

Boogeymen with which to frighten one another's subjects into blind submission.

In the column cited, Richard Fernandez, one of the true ornaments of the Blogosphere, gives us a perfect example of the former. Ponder any recent development in international affairs if you need an example of the latter.

It all culminated in this one sign, which of all the signs at the protest disturbed me the most. Yes, Obama really did say “Show me the movement. Make me do it.” (At least according to Michael Pollan, who quoted Obama while speaking at an environmental event in 2009.) In fact, a more extended quote from that speech might explain the motivation behind this entire protest:

Now, this agenda that I’m talking about, your own agenda, is not gonna happen just because we have a President and a First Lady who are sympathetic. That’s not how change comes. Change is much, much harder than that. Presidents cannot flip the switch and make things happen…. A friend of mine had occasion to have dinner with him and Michelle, and Obama made it clear that he got it, that he really did understand the issue, but he also said he didn’t think the time was right to push hard. He understood the forces arrayed on the other side and the great amount of political capital it would take to defeat them. … He challenged my friend, he said, “Show me the movement. Make me do it. Make me do it.”

I don't know about you, sports fans, but I don't need a cartoon. The governments of the world have decided that we cannot resist them -- that they can take whatever they want without fear of negative consequences. The Obama regime is cleverer about contriving a popular facade for its desires; Obama has encouraged his hardest-left supporters to create a pretense for actions he desperately wants to take but has refrained from taking out of fear of an adverse reaction.

Either we halt these thieves and start pushing them back right now, or within five years they'll own us utterly. Don't imagine that the Twenty-Second Amendment will protect us in America; Obama's successor, even if he's a Republican, is all too likely to preserve whatever usurped powers and Constitutional cessions Obama manages to achieve. After all, he'll reason (if only to himself), they might come in handy some day.

Decent persons can't imagine the lust for power that animates those in high office. It's the one and only thing they value. No amount of power is quite enough; there's always more to be sought, wider and tighter control to be gained. Sadly, getting laid doesn't seem to scratch the itch.

Keep your powder dry. All it will take is a match to start a conflagration that could incinerate the entire world. The time is upon us to make ready. Only the prepared will have a chance to survive.